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Sam LilesSelil BlogDon't forget to duck Secret SquirrelThe scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives. All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.

If you woke him up, I'm gonna lace your street

The confluence of tributaries ...

meeting at a point none could foresee; but in which all have some interest. How's that for an inscrutable statement.

Comes about from having downloaded two articles by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., within the hour: Sam's link and a non-scifi piece, Law and Military Interventions (2001), which deals with Lawfare.

How I got to Lawfare came from reading Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (1999) - about 1/2 way through - which has a brief discussion of Lawfare. Briefly, Lawfare is the use of I Law to weaken the position of a stronger opponent (negative use vs the US), or to strengthen an already strong position (positive use if employed by the US, which has not done well at it).

Use of Lawfare vs the US (and its Western allies) is not really new. The 1959 JAG Treatise on irregular combatants predicted its use (pp.5-6):

Finally, any estimate of the use of irregulars in the future must consider two key tenets of Communism; the inevitability of class warfare, and the command to turn ordinary wars into class wars. Irregular combatants are the means by which a class war is begun and carried out. A Russian publicist has advanced a theory of the legality of irregular warfare based upon a just-unjust war dichotomy, which is partly based upon Marxian theory. The theory seems peculiarly suited to application in class warfare. Therefore, in the future large numbers of irregular combatants may oppose conventional armies. If so, the problem of the legal status of the irregular combatant will be posed in a more acute form than heretofore.

Not a bad crystal ball for 1959 - and a concept equally applicable to Islamic violent actors where the Western regular war laws are ignored.

In fact, adoption of 1977 Additional Protocal I to the GCs seems the earliest example of Lawfare at its highest level. See Rex A. Childers, THE RATIONALITY OF NONCONFORMITY: THE UNITED STATES DECISION TO REFUSE RATIFICATION OF PROTOCOL I ADDITIONAL TO THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS OF 1949 (2008), which discusses this example of Lawfare from the standpoint of national strategies.

Things on this board seem to come around to Small Wars regardless of where they start. Now, on to reading the Dunlop articles & finishing the Chinese piece, which is more up Sam's alley - but also is generally of interest to the question of how much will war be "civilianized" in the future.

Unrestricted Warfare is really interesting. The authors I believe were at Infowarcon earlier this year. I read it a couple years back for the first time and was mystified that nobody else had seemed to read it. Talk about the end of the world as we know it.

I have to say though I don't agree with Gen. Dunlap, though I have attempted to persuade him to my views, and found my arguments not swaying him. I like the guy. In my two discussions with him he was personable intelligent and wholly wrong. But, I liked the guy. And, yes he reads Small Wars Council/Journal I asked him last time we spoke.

By August I should have built up enough evidence to persuade anybody to the end of the world via little tiny bits and bytes. How do eat an elephant? 64 bits at a time.....

Sam LilesSelil BlogDon't forget to duck Secret SquirrelThe scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives. All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.

Hey Slap, I will await ...

your magic girls; but, if they are black magic girls, they have to beat my personal favorite from the 1980s in that genre, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - less well known as Cassandra Peterson, who has aged OK - 57 in this 2005 shot (attached).

Looked better in her 1970s photo shoots for such as Playgirl; but then she was 30 years younger and so was I. The 70s shots are online (you can do the searching); maybe Stan has them archived.